The Art of Getting Things Done

Sometimes I kill time by surfing productivity sites. If you implement every one of their suggestions, you can be productive 24/7--even in your sleep. I even read a blog that detailed how to read magazine articles while flossing your teeth--one of the few activities, I would think, that you couldn't multi-task. (Yes, you can multi-task during that one, too, as Paris Hilton has proved.) If Russia ever launches its nuclear warheads against us, it's comforting to know that I could still get through my to-do list before the bombs land.

The master guru of the personal productivity world is David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I've been a devoted GTD'er for months now. Up until very recently I would have dismissed Allen as another no-money-down huckster, like that guy who claims you can become a billionaire by working four hours a week. I'm also suspicious of anything designed to make me a more efficient employee. American workers achieve their vaunted productivity rates because they spend long hours hunched in front of a computer. The French out-produce us on an hourly basis, although not by much, and they work only thirty-five hours a week. Every undergraduate business major wants to be Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but most likely they'll end up a glorified efficiency expert in some vast corporation, trying to squeeze incremental productivity improvements out of ever-shrinking budgets  and sullen workers.

But there comes a time when you have to get organized, or the only certainties you'll face during a day is stress and exhaustion. Having a second child in March was the tipping point for me, when the 45 minutes of leisure time I had enjoyed a week got shaved down to about two minutes.  I came upon Allen's book while reading a literary blogger (I can't remember who) and thought I'd pick up a few pointers. Five pages into Getting Things Done I learned I was doing everything wrong. That to-do list I maintained on my BlackBerry only covered a small fraction of the things I needed to get done. The fundamental principles of Allen's system are ingenious: write everything down that you need to do--everything, however mundane or speculative. Process those jottings in a leak-proof system that you trust so that you can be confident that you're working on the right task at the right time--and so you know when it's okay to stop working. Don't distinguish between work and personal tasks; everything you do is work upon the world. This last point is, I think, Allen's most valuable insight. Erasing the boundary between work and home is a way around, if not through, the pernicious ideology of work as a form of suffering, that the only real work is those activities that make you suffer.

Allen himself comes across as pragmatic and genial. His only non-material claim is you'll get what he calls "a mind like water" if you use his system. Judging from his hyperkinetic presentation style, his mind is like a gushing faucet.  The GTD crowd--they're too affable, Allen's system too quotidian, to be called a cult--is viral, and they've turned GTD into an open-source system. Hardly anyone, it seems, implements Allen's paper-based system exactly as he prescribes it. There are GTD technologies (iGTD for Macs, ThinkingRock for all PC's) and GTD anti-technologies (the Hipster PDA, which has a large following of its own). In fact, the paper-based v. PC-based system is one of the livelier debates among the GTD crowd; the debate is played out in the two major GTD sites, Lifehacker and 43 Folders.

My own GTD system isn't leakproof--in case you're wondering, I use OneNote for processing, with a BlackBerry and a Moleskine notebook as capture tools--and like a number of GTD'ers, I straddle both the OSX and Windows platforms. Making a GTD system work across platform is one of the last frontiers of GTD research. I continue to search for ways to improve my system. One of the problems with Allen's system is that tending to the system itself is sometimes more interesting than doing the work you need to do. It's a kind of play, of course, which may be the real point of the GTD system.